The Evolutionary Brotherhood

This week I attended a livestream of Dr. Jenna Tonn’s “The Evolutionary Brotherhood: Manliness and Experimental Zoology in 19th-century America” talk, given as a part of the Science History Institute’s Lunchtime Lecture series. I’ll admit that my main motivation in selecting this particular talk was its ability to fit into my schedule for the week, but I was also curious as to what kind of angle was used to approach this topic of “manliness” and “brotherhood”. In my experience, the former term has taken on more negative connotations than the latter, so I was interested to see whether this would be reflected in Dr. Tonn’s work.

Dr. Tonn currently teaches at Boston College, and she previously taught in Harvard’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department after receiving her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard. Her work focuses on the intersection of women and gender in STEM fields, with some of her recent projects including the history of radical feminist biology in the Cold War US and the relationship between feminism and science. This particular lecture was focused on research from her book, Boys in the Laboratory: Masculinity and the Rise of the American Life Sciences, which linked 19^th century conceptions of manhood with the specific experiences of graduate training in zoology. The disciplinary training of zoology students is seen as taking place both inside and outside of formal institutions, with informal friendships and an “intergenerational vision of paying it forward” helping to preserve the atmosphere of an exclusive ‘boys’ club.’

The story begins with Louis Agassiz’s Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, home to the Zoology Department and a prominent reminder of the importance and influence of patronage in scientific work. Agassiz was an anti-transmutationist, meaning he did not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and so Harvard had to contend with this legacy in its attempt to modernize its zoology department. The university hired Edward Lawrence Mark for this task, but his steep task of dealing with Louis Agassiz’s legacy was further complicated by Alexander Agassiz, Louis’s son, who served as a patron for E.L. Mark. I think that highlighting these kinds of overlapping personal and institutional entanglements is very important to understanding why people choose certain kinds of action and inaction, and is definitely still prevalent in our world today. 

Something I appreciated about Dr. Tonn’s approach was the clear elaboration of how this endorsement of fraternity and masculine community benefitted many students. E.L. Mark established within the Harvard Zoological Laboratory a group of “X Men,” inspired by the X Club in Britain, and the zoologists he mentored formed an intimate research community linked by the bonds of brotherhood. One of the members, Albert Gross, had belonged to an actual fraternity back in Illinois, and he imbued the laboratory with a very similar culture. Whereas true friendships did not form in the classroom, they were possible in the laboratory, which as a site of masculine work and struggle was a place where good friends could help each other “become better men.” It seems to me that one of the core appeals of the male-dominated laboratory was that it became a safe space for its male students to struggle and occasionally fail, together, and still put on a brave face for their sweethearts/fiancées, a recurring theme Dr. Tonn points out in the students’ correspondence.

The importance of correspondence and archives was another provocation brought forth by Dr. Tonn that I think was especially timely within the context of our course. She specifically mentioned the importance of letters of recommendation in making or breaking these men’s academic careers and how this was one area in which ideas of virility and normative masculinity came to the fore. There was a limit to how much individual dynamics and levels of cohesion with the group could be revealed in the day-to-day of doing rigorous research at the laboratory, but the thoughts and opinions expressed in personal letters and especially letters of recommendation reveal those undercurrents. The explicit reliance of this research on the personal correspondence of members involved also made me think about issues of privacy; while letters of recommendation are always meant to be somewhat front-facing, I do not imagine many of the graduate students were expecting their letters to their wives and girlfriends to be publicly shared and analyzed. I would be curious to know whether any of the graduate students themselves deposited their correspondence into their respective archives, or if it was done posthumously by colleagues or relatives.

One of the questions that is somewhat (necessarily) unsatisfactorily answered is what did the women think. Dr. Tonn explicitly mentions the archival asymmetry that exists, in that almost none of the female students at Radcliffe were considered important enough to have their correspondence archived. A general account can be inferred and pieced together through the few primary source documents that exist, but it lacks the depth, complexity, and above all personality that can be told from the male perspective. Perhaps our digital age, where nearly everyone leaves some kind of footprint, will provide the material needed to widen future historical perspectives, whether we would prefer to be forgotten or not.